Are Women Catching Up With Men?

While the debate rages, women's fields are getting faster and faster

At this month's Los Angeles Marathon and Gate River Run 15-K in Jacksonville, Florida, the best women runners will be given a "head start" over the fastest men. In this battle of the sexes, the first person to reach the finish, woman or man, will win bonus prize money. It's a neat idea–running's equivalent of the famous Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs tennis match of 1973. It also raises a familiar but fascinating question: Now that more women are running, are they starting to catch the men?

The debate began in the late 1960s when it was noted that the pioneers of women's marathoning often finished with smiles on their faces. The men were gagging and sagging, but the women were waving to the crowds. Hmmm. In the 1977 U.S. 100-mile Championships, Natalie Cullimore placed second among all finishers. Her time was the fourth fastest ever run by an American of either sex. Hmmm again. And then came the theory that has persisted, through debates, controversies, and numerous articles, to the present day: Women are better endurance athletes than men.

In the early 1990s, I devised a plan to test the theory, or so I thought. Runner's World mailed questionnaires to 5,000 subscribers, asking each of them three simple questions: What's your gender? What's your best 5-K time? What's your best marathon time?

A total of 2,296 completed questionnaires were returned, 1,707 from men and 589 from women. A statistician friend did the analysis. His finding: On average, the men's marathon performances were 10.71 times slower than their 5-K performances, while women's performances were 10.45 slower. In other words, the women slowed down less. They seemed to have more endurance. Moreover, to quote my friend: "While the difference might seem small, it is in fact very statistically significant because the sample size is so large."

It is here that we encounter for the first time the old chestnut from Mark Twain's autobiography–the line about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." My questionnaire was interesting enough. But my conclusion, based on the statistical results, was pure Swiss cheese. Among the holes: Maybe the testosterone-charged men in my sample started their marathons too fast, then hit the wall. This wouldn't prove anything about women having more endurance, although it might indicate that men have fewer brain cells, as my wife has often told me.

The women-have-more-endurance theory received its 15 minutes of greatest fame in 1992 when the popular "Special Correspondence" section of Nature magazine published a letter proposing, through statistical trickery, that women would beat men in the marathon by 1998. Since 1998 has come and gone, we can perform pagan dances on this prediction. Indeed, from 1990 to 1998, the time gap between the women's marathon world record and the men's record increased from 14:16 to 14:42.

Wait a minute. How could women be slowing down? The answer came from one of the most insightful running articles ever written, even though it appeared in a most unlikely place, William F. Buckley's conservative political magazine, The National Review. In a lengthy story titled "Track & Battlefield" (December 31, 1997), a Chicago businessman named Steve Sailor and the like-named Steven Seiler, Ph.D., an American physiologist teaching in Norway, offered proof positive that women in the 1990s were slowing down at all running distances.

Why? Because random out-of-competition drug testing made its debut in early 1989. And because the Berlin Wall came tumbling down the same year, followed by the breakup of the former Soviet Union. This brought an end to the massive sports systems that had given performance-enhancing drugs to athletes. (Note: Women benefit more from steroid drugs, so men's performances didn't suffer as much from the withdrawal of steroids.)

Happily, in this new century, women are getting faster again, as Paula Radcliffe proved with her incredible 2:15:25 marathon world record in April 2003. With that mighty effort, she lowered the male-female differential in the marathon to just 10 minutes and 30 seconds, far less than it has ever been. But does Radcliffe's great leap forward mean that women distance runners are closing the gap on men? Will they eventually catch and surpass men, particularly at the marathon and ultramarathon distances? The answer: No way.

If you believe that women will catch men, you must pull together both a physiological and a statistical argument. Over the years, many have tried, and all have failed. On the physiological front, the favorite argument has been that women have more body fat than men (true) and can utilize that fat as a fuel better than men can (false).

According to Mark Tarnopolsky, Ph.D., an expert in the field, the current research looks like this: Women (A) burn fat slightly better than men, at least when they haven't eaten recently; and (B) burn simple sugars (sports drinks and gels) better than men; but (C) don't store glycogen as well as men when carbo-loading. By the time you add A and B, then subtract C, you get...basically no difference. And women still have to lug around that annoying body fat. For this and other reasons, women have a significantly lower maximum aerobic capacity, on average, than men.

A woman could use other physiological strengths to beat a man, of course. She could have more muscle (to move the legs faster) or more hemoglobin (to give the muscles a richer supply of oxygen) or a better running economy (to run more efficiently). However, men have far more muscle-building testosterone and hemoglobin than women, and running economy studies have shown no difference between the genders.

But what about ultradistances? If women have more endurance, they should get closer to men as the distance increases. At most track distances, women trail men by about 10 to 11 percent, but Paula Radcliffe is just 8.4 percent behind Paul Tergat in the marathon. Ultra star Ann Trason has won several 150-mile races outright, and Pam Reed beat the men in the Badwater 135-miler two years in a row. Do women catch up with men if the distance just gets long enough?

No. At the ultradistances, women's times–even Trason's and Reed's–trail men by 15 percent or more. The gap gets bigger as the distance increases. And I even checked the Sri Chinmoy Transcendence 3,100-mile race. That's right: 3,100 miles. The event has been held for eight years in New York City, and the current men's record is 42 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and 3 seconds. The female record is 49 days, plus 14:30:54. That's a difference of 16.5 percent.

At this point, we'd be smart to stop fussing over statistics and time differentials. We've come a long way since women first started entering road races in the 1960s. The important thing now is simply that women can run any and all distances they choose. Women don't need to chase men. All they need is the chance to chase their own potential.